Room EV-11.705, Milieux Resource Room Bea Dieker (Frankfurt, Germany)Appealing or Disgusting? Atmospheres: The Most Powerful Game ChangersWhat makes an apartment, a city, an employer, or a means of transportation appealing or unappealing? Are the factors aesthetic, or are they social? Material or immaterial? And isn’t all of this highly subjective? When people wait together for the bus in the rain, we see how weather, architecture, and personal interact...

2026 will mark the 20th anniversary of the launch of The Senses and Society and coining of the term ‘sensory studies.’ Senses and Society was founded by Michael Bull and David Howes (who have alternated in the role of Managing Editor every 3-4 years) and Doug Kahn and Paul Gilroy. The term sensory studies was selected (over e.g. ‘sensography’) and used in the title of the inaugural article, ‘Introducing Sensory Studies,’ in order to serve as an umbrella term for the multiple sub...

Annabel Castro ∆ (Cinema and Communication, Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico)Sensing the Borderland in the Work of Female Writers from Northern Mexico and South AsiaThe objective of this paper is to analyze the role of multisensorial representation in producing the reader’s borderland experience. It focuses on literary work by female authors from Northern Mexico and South Asia. Particularly on specific texts by Juana Adcock, Orfa Alarcón, Patricia Laurent, Ila Arab Mehta...

The Gallery opens at 10h30 and will close at 13h30There will be two artist’s talk/happenings in EV-6.270 on Thursday.Thursday’s featured artists are: • Emilie O’Brien, What the Body Knows: A Code for Living Well Together from 11h30 to 12h30; and• Firat Erdim, Field Harp from 12h30-13h30

Gail Kehan Liu (American Studies, University of Nottingham, UK)Disabled Norms, Disaffected Us: Disaffection and Unfeeling in Salt Fish GirlThis paper examines Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai’s 2002 speculative novel Salt Fish Girl through the lens of Xine Yao's theorization of disaffection. This paper argues that the disaffection in Salt Fish Girl, which is marked as the characters' stench, reconfigures notions of agency, challenges dominant affective norms and opens ...

Room EV 6.270Emilie O’Brien, What the Body Knows: A Code for Living Well Together from 11h30 to 12h30

Polina Dimova (Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA) ∆This keynote address investigates the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific discourses of synaesthesia that inspired the flourishing exchanges among the modern arts. It offers twenty theses on synaesthesia to trace the controversies surrounding the phenomenon: from the cooperation of the nineteenth-century arts and sciences in attempting to define synaesthesia to the present rift between th...

KS Brewer (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)Fly Affinities: Sensing Ecstasy in Decay through Interspecies RelationsThis past spring, I cared for hundreds of flesh flies (sacrophaga bullata) in my apartment, and fed them my blood throughout their lives. I did so out of an interest in exploring the possibility of ecstatic decay—conceived as a vibrant material entanglement, post-death, that locates the transcendence of ecstasy in the body, rather than out of it (Bennett...

Zoe Silverman ∆ (UC Berkeley School of Education, USA)"They Sing Songs": (Re)considering Touch as Sensory Pedagogy in MuseumsThis paper (re)considers touch as a pedagogical strategy and epistemic modality in contemporary museums. A close study of two objects at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) —an abalone shell as “handling object” and an encased Klamath River woman’s dance skirt as “artifact” — illuminates the tensions that arise when museums deploy multisensory d...

Organizers: Nina Morris ∆ (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Kate McLean-MacKenzie ∆ (University of Kent, UK) Early Morning Smellwalk led by Kate McLean-MacKenzie. Starting in Mont Royal park at 6.00am this guided early morning smellwalk (limited to 10) will lead participants through the city’s ‘morning’ olfactory landscape. As a research methodology that involves exploring a place with a focus on the smells you experience, the goal...

Karis Jade Petty √ (Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton)Landscapes made Visible: Seeing in the Mind’s Eye for the Non-congenitally Sight ImpairedEven when there is no vision through the anatomical eyes, people who are non-congenitally sight impaired often describe “visual” experiences of the landscape through “seeing in the mind’s eye”. This imaginative sight is a ‘way of seeing’ through eyes of another time and can be understood as a ‘phantom vision’. Intentiona...

Organizer: David Howes ∆ Polina Dimova ∆; Jeremy Stolow ∆; John Lee Clark ∆; Lida Zeitlin-Wu ∆This “meet the author” roundtable has a unique format. Instead of presenting their own work, each author will offer an appreciation of the work of the author with whom they are paired. The first pair consists of Jeremy Stolow commenting on Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses: the Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism, followed by ...

Sundar Sarukkai∆ (Public Intellectual, Founder of Barefoot Philosophers, India)The mystery of the senses is as much in the 'objects' of sensation as in their mechanism. A theory of the senses influences a theory of objects. The sense organs do not perceive the objects per se but only qualities. If this is the case, how can we understand the long held suspicion towards collective and social ontology? In this talk, I will explore some ideas on the ontology of the social and relate it to ...

Erika Wicky ∆ (Departments of History and Art History, Université de Grenoble, France)A Taste for the Scent of Sugar: Perfumery and Confectionery in 19th-Century FranceWhile the role of synthetic materials such as coumarin, heliotropin, and vanillin in the development of the perfume industry at the end of the 19th century is often acknowledged, it is frequently overlooked that these substances were initially used to flavor candies and liquors—two highly sweetened product...

Organizer: Lida Zeitlin-Wu ∆ (Communication & Theatre Arts/ Institute for the Humanities, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, USA)The five-part division of the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—might seem selfevident. Yet this framework, along with the prioritization of sight (sometimes termed "ocularcentrism"), reflects imperialist hierarchies of perception rooted in Enlightenment thinking. In media studies and TS, emerging technologies frequently reinforce dominant s...

Hayleigh Giesbrecht (Faculty of Information, University of Toronto)Palpable Pasts: Affect, Materiality, and ASMR in GLAMASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a “sensory phenomenon in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli” (Barratt & Davis, 2015, p. 1). First identified in 2010, ASMR has since evolved into a popu...